Hold Congress Accountable

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The Class of 2015 brought in a number of strong, liberty-loving members to the House of Representatives. All around the country, political newcomers were winning elections by campaigning for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom. After just a year of governance, few have delivered on those ideas the way that Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) has, never failing to put his legislation where his mouth is, winning FreedomWorks’ FreedomFighter Award with a first-year score of 95 percent on the FreedomWorks Congressional Scorecard.

Conservatives give a lot of lip service to the Constitution, but too few actually read it or know what it says. While many focus on the admittedly important Bill of Rights, the meat of the Constitution outlines the basic functions of government, including the checks and balances designed to keep tyranny from America's door. It is respect for these checks and balances that has driven some lawmakers to launch the Article I Project, an initiative aimed at restoring the separation of powers and using Congress to rein in the excesses of the executive branch.

Reasserting lost Congressional authority has been a major theme this year, with the creation of the Article I Project and a House task force on executive overreach. Many legislators have taken charge in curbing the waste and latency plaguing the federal government, and Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA-5) is the latest to join the fight for such accountability.

The regulatory state has grown into the fourth branch of government. Executive branch agencies act with impunity, without accountability to Congress or to the voters. The Secretaries of Education, Energy, and Health and Human Services are basically unelected lawmakers who have the power to dramatically affect the lives and prosperity of every American citizen.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling was first elected to Congress in 2002 to represent Texas’ 5th Congressional District. He holds a lifetime score of 91 percent on the FreedomWorks Congressional Scorecard, has won the annual FreedomFighter Award multiple times, and achieved a perfect score for three consecutive years.

Boldly wielding his pen and phone, President Obama has shamelessly used executive power to bypass those pesky Republican majorities in Congress. But these broad powers that he has used (and abused), the executive orders and the overbroad regulations, can in most respects be blamed on decades of Congressional atrophy. Which is why it is so encouraging that reasserting Congress’ constitutional authority has finally become a top-line issue in Washington D.C., with the launch of multiple major projects dedicated to the restoration of the full range of powers in Article I of the U.S. Constitution.

Article I of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to make law and to allocate how money is spent in the enforcement of those laws. The president’s role, in contrast, was envisioned by the founders as much more limited. They didn’t want a king, who could govern as he pleased without accountability to the people, and so they restricted his role to Commander in Chief of the military, with the power to make treaties only with the advice and consent of the Senate.